Case Study

Working With Dell: Empowering Customers to Compare and Choose Easily

Dell is one of the world’s largest computer manufacturers and IT services company, employing more than 100,000 people worldwide. The company is well-known for its innovations in supply chain management and electronic commerce, particularly its direct-sales model and its “build-to-order” or “configure to order” approach to manufacturing – delivering individual PCs delivered to customer specifications.

Dell is one of GraphicPeople’s oldest clients, playing an important role in helping the studio become a leading outsourcing hub in the region. High-volume, complex and multi-lingual adaptation of Dell’s global communications has been a regular part of the GraphicPeople print and digital production schedule for the last 10 years. Over half a million production units later, from catalogues to direct mailers, the Dell team at GraphicPeople comprises of around 100 dedicated web developers and desktop publishers. Regular tasks on the Dell account include simultaneous, hi-volume activation of digital advertising campaigns and product catalogues across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia Pacific-Japan, and North American markets. With the confidence of working on a trusted account, GraphicPeople has also started contributing advanced digital deliverables, including complex websites and innovative web solutions. Given its diverse range of products, Dell was looking for a way to make shopping easier for customers. The following project was designed to give Dell customers an enhanced digital experience when choosing, comparing and purchasing Dell products. An interactive web experience would also help to reach out to a wider demographic and attract new customers.

Work Cut Out

Development and deployment of a multi-lingual website with product filtering and comparison features, harvesting information from Dell’s DBM brochures and multi-lingual offline product catalogues. This would help Dell shareholders, partners and end-users easily compare products at the front end, and help website administrators easily upload product information at the back end. The website spans 18 countries in 18 languages across European markets.

Delivering to Dell: The Challenge

Given the reach and diversity of Dell products, any complex multi-lingual project would always present a coordination challenge. The GraphicPeople team were well experienced in navigating these issues with earlier high-volume print production of Dell catalogues. The main challenge in this project was to deliver a digital shopping experience where customers could easily compare and choose products by viewing different product specifications together in one place, side-by-side. An interactive website would create an enhanced user experience where purchase decisions could be made more conveniently in an easily navigable environment. The team had to deliver this complex project within a tight 2-month timeframe, which included developing customized cookie management coding for each of the 18 websites.

“During cookie management coding, we realized that each country website’s cookie management terms and conditions would be governed by different laws in different countries. So being legally correct was also critical for the digital team members!” reveals Shoharab Hossain, Senior Project Manager at GraphicPeople’s Digital Production Unit, who lead the website project team.

How GraphicPeople helped

After a briefing from the client, the project team conceptualized the website structure and proposed wireframes, features, workflow processes and costs. The Wunderman production team in Denmark then stepped in with a graphical mockup of the website based on the proposal. Back in Dhaka, the 5-member project team then started work converting the PSD mockup. The WordPress theme and plug-in for the comparison grid was developed. To help website administrators easily upload large amounts of technical product specifications, a popular CSV file format upload system was designed, the same format commonly used to store product information in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Results Delivered

After 250 man-hours of collaboration between the project manager, senior web developers and tech QA engineer, the 5-member Dhaka team had developed a powerful, simple to manage CMS, and 18 regional websites for a happy client. Additional features of the website include options to export the customized comparison results to a PDF file and also share results with others through email. The custom user tracking system provides data on customer behavior to help improve future marketing efforts and website optimization.

After a decade of working on Dell’s global advertising production, the GraphicPeople team is positioned to add value in newer ways as the brand adapts to an exciting time for digital communications worldwide. “Our relationship with Dell has not just grown stronger with time, but also through the innovations we have contributed in the way Dell markets itself globally” says Imtiaz Ilahi, Managing Director of GraphicPeople. Partnering with one of its most valuable clients promises to be an exciting digital journey for the region’s leading offshore solutions center.